From the article, quoting the profiled professor: "Persuasion is based on emotion; it is not based on logic. If everybody knew that 1 percent of the [Twitter] accounts are responsible for 30 percent of the traffic, people would be more careful thinking about that. But the vast majority of people don’t know that. Information is propagated through retweets from others who are either fooled or agree. At the end of the day, people receive some piece of misinformation, and many will not realize that it has come from one account that has been blasting messages. They will think that it came from friends."
In other words, young people who have grown up in the Internet era still need to learn about checking sources, finding information sources off the Internet, and cooling their emotions and tribal allegiances before deciding complicated issues of social policy. That's not news to anyone who reads Hacker News regularly. Every political movement and every electoral campaign for public office has a tendency to try out various persuasion strategies, empirically, seeing what works by looking at the results of campaigns. Voters who are resilient to the spreading of rumors are still the best protection for free and fair elections. One thing that helps voters become more skeptical is the back-and-forth of competing campaigns, so I'm not sure that the "social media manipulation" mentioned in the article is any more inherently dangerous than the inflammatory political cartoons of the early nineteenth century.
My first impulse on reading the parent comment was an urge to note the difference in propagation speed between the inflammatory political cartoon and the manipulative tweet. On reflection, I think the impact of this delta is more than balanced by the resources a critical observer can bring to bear in the context of the process as it exists today. That being said, the political process in the US seems designed to marginalize critical thinkers trying to arrive at sound public policy, leaving the field to those forwarding and protecting private agendas. The national conversation, such as it is, is driven by those parties most adept at injecting noise into public communication channels.
Every time my kids tell me something they've learned online, there ensues a conversation about how everything posted online must be true because it is posted online.
What I haven't done well enough is teach them where to go to determine if something is true. Thanks for helping me realize that so I can do something about it.
Almost as good as grass fish, though given some weather events they do make an appearance once in a while. I did do a image search of "octopus in a tree" on google and saw more results than one would of thought, which goes to show that on the internet you can always find something to back up your imagination as reality - scary.
xD that's a good one! I haven't seen that hoax before. One of my personal favorites is DHMO, though it's of a slightly different flavor: http://dhmo.org/
In other words, young people who have grown up in the Internet era still need to learn about checking sources, finding information sources off the Internet, and cooling their emotions and tribal allegiances before deciding complicated issues of social policy. That's not news to anyone who reads Hacker News regularly. Every political movement and every electoral campaign for public office has a tendency to try out various persuasion strategies, empirically, seeing what works by looking at the results of campaigns. Voters who are resilient to the spreading of rumors are still the best protection for free and fair elections. One thing that helps voters become more skeptical is the back-and-forth of competing campaigns, so I'm not sure that the "social media manipulation" mentioned in the article is any more inherently dangerous than the inflammatory political cartoons of the early nineteenth century.